BigBlueButton

BigBlueButton is a free software web conferencing system for Linux servers. Its intended use is online learning. BigBlueButton is an affiliate member of the Open Source Initiative.

Features

BigBlueButton offers certain core features including:

• real-time sharing of audio, video, screen
• public/private chat
• Upload of PDF and Microsoft Office documents
• Interactive whiteboard
• Integration with phone systems (using FreeSWITCH)

Certain use cases are intended for teachers using the software, including:

• Tutoring/virtual office hours
• Flipped classroom
• Group collaboration
• Full online classes

BigBlueButton is a pure HTML5 client; no application is required to use it. It uses the browser’s support for web real-time communications WebRTC to send/receive audio, video, and screen.

Architecture

As a web page application, BigBlueButton front-end uses React and the backend uses MongoDB and Node.js. It also uses Redis to maintain an internal list of its meetings, attendees, and any other relevant information.

The BigBlueButton server runs on Ubuntu 16.04 64-bit and can be installed either from packages or install script. There is work underway to move to Ubuntu 18.04 in BigBlueButton 2.3.

Security

In October 2020 the German tech news portal golem.de published an article about several vulnerabilities in BigBlueButton. They criticized the unsafe use of LibreOffice, cookies without a secure flag and the use of old Ubuntu and Node.js versions. “I found a bunch of other security issues in BigBlueButton and proposed some hardening changes.” wrote Hanno Böck. “This took a lot of back and forth, but all significant issues are resolved now.”

The above material were retrieved from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BigBlueButton)